How to Create and Manage MATERIAL LIBRARIES in the Blender Asset Browser!

what's up guys justin here with the cgessentials.com so in today's video we're going to talk about how to manage your materials using blender 3.0 asset browser let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so what we want to do is we want to set up our material library so we can add our own materials to the blender asset browser so as you know blender 3.0 added the asset browser function in here which you can add by clicking the little drop down in any of your windows and selecting the option for asset browser so in this case i'm usually finding that keeping my asset browser on the bottom of the page is working the best for me but that's going to vary for everyone so what that does is that gives us access to our asset library and so from a material standpoint what that does is that allows us to take materials that we have saved into a blender folder and drop them onto objects inside a blender so instead of me having to go copy them from another job or go find any of this you can see how it's substantially easier to add materials to objects in blender using this tool so what i want to do is talk about how to set this up so let's say for example that we wanted to add some additional materials to our library so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a separate blender file i've actually already created the file over here and what i've done is i've created different kinds of materials in here so i've got like some car paint material which is going to have a little flex in it that's going to reflect light and you can see how the flecks are kind of affecting that i've also got some just like simple glossy plastic materials in here that literally are just like a glossy setup and so what i want to do is i want to set this up so that these show up inside of our asset browser and so remember that the way that the asset library works or the asset browser works in blender is you have a folder which you set inside of your preferences so if you go into your preferences and you look at your file paths you can see how there's a section in here for setting different folders for your asset libraries so notice for me i have several different folders in here but generally speaking i'm saving my full my assets to the justin's assets folder so it's just this location right here and if we open that up notice how what it is it's basically just a folder with different blender files saved inside of it and every time that i open up blender and i look in the asset browser it's referencing the folders that i've set in here in order to see what objects are set as assets so what we want to do is we've created a separate blender file with these materials inside of it right so i've named them so they've all got different names orange car paint yellow car paint everything like that and notice how if you open up your asset browser in the current file section those assets are going to show up in this list right here so you can take them and let's say that we had a sphere right here well shade is smooth i can drag any of those materials onto this object once you get this set up you want to save this file inside of your assets location so notice i've already saved this in my blender assets folder so if i click on save right here and i look in that folder notice how my paint materials blend file is saved inside of that folder so that means every time i open up a new blender file it's going to reference this folder for the assets that are contained in here and so the other thing you need to make sure to do so that these assets show up is inside inside of your material properties over here you want to make sure that you right click on these and click mark as asset so let's say for example that you see yellow car pay is on this list let's say that i was to clear the asset well notice how when i clear the asset it no longer shows up in the list of materials that are saved inside of this file but if i was to right click on it and click mark as asset notice how now that's going to show up in this file in the same way let's say that i was to create a new glossy material right here so i'm just going to adjust the color whoops let's make sure we make that unique first because it's referencing the old color but i've created a new one right here and let's say we wanted like a yellow car paint or a yellow glossy material like this well all i would do is i would just name this paint glossy yellow and i would right click on it and make sure that i set it as an asset well as soon as i set it as an asset now if i go back and look in my asset browser notice how my paint glossy yellow is going to show up in here and so now if i was to jump over into my original file that we had open or any new blender file really if i was to click the drop down and go into the justin's asset folder which is the folder i saved this in and click on all notice how those paint materials are going to show up inside of that folder like this so my orange car paint my glossy blue paint all of those are going to show up inside of my folder so i can now use them in any blender file and so one thing i want to do is i want to organize them i want to give them kind of a designation so that i can click in here and find them right so like my flooring material and a lot of these came out of the blender a lot of these came out of the blender diorama example file but what i want to do is i want to have my paint show up in this list as well so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go back into this folder and in my current file in this drop down right here i want to click the plus button what that's going to do is that's going to let me create a new catalog the catalog is basically the way that you're going to manage your materials in this case right for this object right here i just want to right click on it and click rename and i want to call this car i actually want to call it paint dash car like this usually i like to put the kind of material before the specificness of it the specificity of it that way all of the paint objects will be together but then we can just take these materials so for example the green carpet orange car paint and again this is why paint should be first because then they'd all be together but i can take all of those and drag them into the paint car catalog right here well now if i click in here and look at this inside of the current file i have these objects for my catalog and i'm going to create another catalog right here we're going to call this paint dash glossy right here then i'm going to go back into my all and i'm going to find my glossy paint right here and i'm going to drag them into the paint dash glossy notice how these have a star on them right here so that means that we need to save our file so now if i click on file save what that's done is that's added those objects as catalogs inside of the current file what that means is that means now if i go into my separate blender file right here and i click on the button to refresh what it's going to do is it's going to go find any changes that were made to files inside of that folder so now if i click on the car paint material right here notice how those show up in their own catalog what that does is that makes it really easy to keep my materials organized and so this would work exactly the same way for materials that are set up with like different material maps or textures you would just create them as materials mark them as assets and then save that file inside of that folder and one thing i would say from a personal preference standpoint is to keep these uh files from getting super big i would probably create different files for like um i would probably create different files for like brick and masonry for different metals for like tiles and other things like that just to keep these files from getting massive because once you start bringing in the higher resolution textures this can just get a little bit cumbersome if you are interested i can make a video on that but that's basically how i would manage my materials inside a blender so i'll link to some other tutorials about the asset browser and blender 3.0 features on this page but leave a comment below let me know if you have any questions as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 64,649

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender materials, blender material library, blender asset materials, blender asset browser, blender asset browser tutorial, blender materials asset browser library

Id: CdYz9oLuAOI

Length: 8min 14sec (494 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022